the
monks and on the Roman Curia. A yet more terrible scorn of the crime and
vice which disgraced the Church inspired the _Apocalypse_ and the
_Confession of Bishop Goliath_, the work of Walter Map, Archdeacon of
Oxford, king's chaplain ever since the days when Becket was chancellor,
justiciar, ambassador, poet, scholar, theologian, satirist. The greater
part of the legends of the Saint Graal that sprang out of the work of
Robert de Boron were probably woven together by his genius; and were
used in the great strife to prove that the English Church originated
independently of Rome. His _Courtier's Triflings_, suggested by John of
Salisbury's _Polycraticus_, is the only book which actually bears his
name, and with its gossip, its odd accumulations of learning, its
fragments of ancient history, its outbursts of moral earnestness, its
philosophy, brings back to us the very temper of the court and the stir
and quickening of men's minds--a stir which found expression in other
works of bitter satire, in the lampoon of _Ralph Niger_, and in the
violent attacks on the monks by _Nigellus_.

Nor was the new intellectual activity confined to the court. The whole
country shared in the movement. Good classical learning might be had in
England, if for the new-fashioned studies of canon law and theology men
had to go abroad; but conservative scholars grumbled that now law and
physics had become such money-making sciences that they were beginning
to cut short the time which used to be given to classical studies.
Gerald of Wales mourned over the bringing in from Spain of "certain
treatises, lately found and translated, pretended to have been written
by Aristotle," which tended to foster heresy. The cathedral schools,
such as York, Lincoln, or London, played the part of the universities in
our own day. The household of the Archbishop of Canterbury had been the
earliest and the most distinguished centre of learning. Of all the
remarkable men of the day there was none to compare with John of
Salisbury, the friend of Theobald and of Becket, and his book, the
__Polycraticus_ (1156-59), was perhaps the most important work of the
time. It begins by recounting the follies of the court, passes on to the
discussion of politics and philosophy, deals with the ethical systems of
the ancients, and hints at a new system of his own, and is everywhere
enriched by wide reading and learning acquired at the schools of
Chartres and Paris London could boast o